Ask students to examine how Times writers introduce and build a portrait of their subjects.
What Steavenson manages to do is build a portrait of Egypt through looking at it from the street.
Narrated in reverse chronological order by a fictional Japanese apprentice, the book is extremely readable and deftly builds a portrait of the artist as pure egoist.
Moreover, in their cross-examination of Federal Bureau of Investigation witnesses, defense lawyers were able to build a portrait of serial misjudgments and missed opportunities by government investigators.
Examining items like bills, stray videocassettes and an umbrella, they build a portrait of several New Yorkers, including a journal writer with a fevered style and a family struggling to get by.
From this confusion he builds a portrait of gloom, seeing the plight of our churches through a cliched business model – a re-run of Dr Beeching's verdict with churches as unremunerative branch lines.
Alex Nunns, a British journalist, and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was on the ground in Cairo during the protests, began archiving tweets as they were posted, and have been combing through feeds ever since to build a portrait of, as Nunns tweeted in February, a "1st draft [of] history".
This was perhaps because lately most of the music documentaries I have seen have been cleaner, more conventional affairs – John Scheinfeld's excellent Harry Nilsson: The Missing Beatle, for instance, which interviewed the songwriter's family, friends and associates, and drew on archive footage, home movies and personal photographs to build a portrait.
Timbuktu, released in the UK on Friday, follows this approach, interweaving the stories of residents of the ancient Malian city – in recent years wracked by violence and Islamic fundamentalism – he builds a portrait of daily life full of empathy and humanity.
